Living in a train station

Towards the end of June my apartment became something like a train station. People (and frogs and cats) in and out and staying and leaving and bringing stuff and leaving it or taking it too. Once that stopped and everything got settled again, stuff kept on arriving, so it's not so much of a train station as it is a storage locker. There are boxes everywhere, cats eating potted plants and destroying stuff, and a frog in the closet.

It's hard to draw in a train station or a storage locker.

Also, when you draw all day at work every day, it's easy to start to think about just watching a movie or drooling around on the internet when you get home. You're keeping your skills up at work, right? And then you sit down and try to draw your own stuff, and it looks like someone ate a bunch of how-to-draw books and then barfed on the page. You sit there looking at the cliched overdrawn crap and then hunker down to draw through the pile of bad drawings that have amassed.
Or maybe it's just me...?

I keep forgetting to not draw pretty. When you draw pretty, everything looks the same... it's better to draw honestly, and then the beauty springs out from unexpected places. It's also easier to get character in honest drawings, because when you're not worried about making the face beautiful, you can get more interesting expressions.




This is the girl from Gosford Park and a guy who ended up looking like a waiter from Ratatouille. If you haven't seen Ratatouille, you should go. The performances from all the characters (and actors) were amazing, everything is beautiful, and it gives you interesting story turns... awesome altogether. Go see it.
If you haven't seen Gosford Park, see that too! Yyou'll have to watch it twelve times to figure out what the heck is going on - it's very much a window into another world, where everyone has pasts and (most of them have) futures. Plus it's got Clive Owen, Maggie Smith, and Kelly MacDonald.